POLITICS : Millionaire Taylor Casts Himself as Working Man’s Candidate : He’s spending $10 million on bid for presidency. If he gets job, ordinary folks would be winners, he says.

For a guy who likes to brag about being a doer, not a talker, Morry Taylor has a lot to say.

Folks in this town of 11,000 found that out recently as arguably the most colorful of the Republican presidential candidates held forth during a meet-and-greet gathering at The Hotel.

A standing-room-only crowd, upward of 130 northwestern Iowans, jammed into puffy parkas and a stuffy room to hear the business tycoon’s plan for running the country in the improbable event that he should get the chance.

Taylor, 51, does not mince words on the stump. “I speak blunt,” he says.

And why not? Taylor’s tough-guy business persona has earned him the nickname “The Griz” on Wall Street, a sobriquet he relishes. As chief executive of Titan Wheel International Inc., maker of heavy equipment tires, Taylor has won acclaim as a rescuer of troubled factories.

The company now includes 15 manufacturing plants in eight states employing more than 3,000, as well as five plants in Western Europe. And it has made Taylor rich enough to afford the luxury of a self-financed run for the presidency.

Despite his millions, Taylor sees himself as the working man’s candidate. He entered the race last May after telling workers at his Des Moines plant that he would step forward to offer them a choice from the usual lot of politicians.

But plans to make those workers the bulwark of his Iowa support fizzled fast. Still smarting over cuts in pay and benefits, his employees were in no mood to join a Taylor bandwagon. Relations are so strained, union workers cheered when a monogrammed Titan shirt was set afire after a recent party.

None of this has fazed Taylor. He’s on the primary ballot in 28 states and is devoting $10 million and his considerable energies to making a strong showing in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

So, in a style that brings to mind a bad imitation of Humphrey Bogart, Taylor set out on the recent night in Spencer to woo voters, albeit in an unorthodox way:

Iowans are “stupid” to put up with high state taxes, he says to this group of Iowans. Farmers--of whom there are a few in this crowd--should “get off their duffs” and fight for better trade conditions.

He then broadens his message--prisons should be “a living hell,” he says. Food stamps should be abolished, the IRS scrapped, the Pentagon mothballed (he’d disperse the brass to local military bases).

Indeed, the crux of Taylor’s credo is simple: “Cut the bureaucracy, folks.” Specifically, 3 million federal bureaucrats, all managers earning between $143,000 and $50,000 annually, would get the heave-ho if Taylor were at the nation’s helm. That, he says, would balance the budget without cutting services.

“I don’t believe in cutting Medicare and Social Security,” Taylor says. “I believe in cutting Washington.”

Sally Muilenberg and her husband, Stan, both retired, were impressed with Taylor’s plain talk in Spencer. “He reminded me a lot of Ross Perot,” she says. “I thought he said it like it is.”

But Barbara Van Wyk, 27, a youth pastor, was put off by Taylor’s “ballistic” style. “He made me feel like an idiot,” Van Wyk says. “He put people down.”

Even if they didn’t like the speech, though, the evening wasn’t a total loss. There was free food--even an open bar, courtesy of Taylor, who has hired a campaign staff of 30 to promote the quixotic bid for a job he says he doesn’t want.

“I’ve never, ever, wanted to be president,” Taylor says. “It would be hell.”

Another plus for those who braved the cold to spend the shank of their evening at The Hotel: A chance to win a 13-inch color TV, a standard giveaway at major Taylor campaign events.

A day later, his campaign unveiled a $25,000 giveaway as part of a direct-mail blitz. Taylor mailed 100,000 Iowa Republicans a questionnaire; among those who return it, someone from each of Iowa’s five congressional districts will win $5,000 apiece in a drawing held before the Feb. 12 caucuses.

Explaining the rationale for the giveaway, Taylor says he would rather the money went to real people, not some “hack” pollster.

Such are the inducements the Michigan native is offering to bring the gospel-according-to-Morry to voters. And although political insiders don’t give him a prayer, Taylor says he’s having the time of his life barnstorming in one of his two corporate planes.

At each stop, he pops open the door while the plane is still moving, leaps out and is halfway across the Tarmac by the time the engines are cut. Waiting for him, in one of six motor homes dispatched to greet him on the ground, is a campaign mascot, a golden retriever named Honey Bear. (Her brother, The Griz, plays the role of the candidate’s best friend in New Hampshire.)

In the motor home, Taylor puts up his feet, grabs a cell phone and is off and running, doing back-to-back interviews with every radio station within calling distance.

The son of a tool-and-die maker, Taylor grew up in small towns. At high school in Ellsworth, Mich., he lettered in four sports and “was always in love.” Taylor fell a hair’s breadth short of a degree from Michigan Technological University after a “jerk professor” cut his grade, leaving him a hundredth of a point shy of the required 2.0 average.

“They wanted me to come back another term and take a phys ed class,” Taylor says derisively.

Instead, he took an engineer’s job at General Motors and later worked as a welder for his dad. Mostly, though, Taylor was a manufacturer’s rep who was always on the road. “I carry my pillow when I travel,” he says.

In 1983, he and a partner bought Titan. The company’s growth explosion has come mostly in the last three years.

Even as an executive, Taylor likes to get his hands greasy on the plant floor. He says he honors rank-and-file workers over “suits” and has never bounced an hourly worker after buying a company. Instead, he guts management.

Part and parcel of Taylor’s professed solidarity with his workers was his hope to use them to help him in the caucuses. But in Des Moines, he was stymied by the guys at the union hall.

“He came down here and asked us to endorse him because he was for the working man and he hadn’t forgotten where he came from,” says Marty Middleswart, a 31-year employee at the tire plant.

The vote was unanimous against endorsing Taylor.

“He ain’t no more for the working man that I am for going to the moon,” says Dick Larsen. “I wouldn’t vote for him for dogcatcher.”

True to Taylor’s fabled hard-line approach in contract negotiations, wages were cut and, as a substitute, profit-sharing added after he bought the Des Moines plant in 1994 from Pirelli. Pensions and retirement health insurance were eliminated, union officials say.

Says Taylor: “It’s going to take awhile for them to get used to my style.”

Within that style are the contradictions that define the entrepreneur.

Taylor brags about having thick skin, but frets because reporters write that he is a rich man on an ego trip. He plays up his reputation as a boss who mercilessly fires anyone who disappoints. But in the next breath, he talks with equanimity about a foul-up that ruined thousands of Christmas cards earmarked for voters. No heads rolled in his campaign staff.

Where was Mr. Tough Guy? “Sometimes it’s better to have the reputation so you don’t have to use it,” Taylor says.

His wife, Michelle, confirms that, away from work, Morry is a soft touch who over the years has helped nearly everyone in their families. “The Griz is a teddy bear at home,” she says.

And if home were the White House?

“With me as a president, it would be nonstop action,” Taylor says. “The intellectuals would be going nuts. But the working men and women would be doing pretty good.”